Abstract

Nowadays, an increasing number of organizations hire knowledge leaders to create and maintain a knowledge management environment. However, the critical issues these individuals face are very poorly defined in today's academic literature. Using a web-based Delphi method, this study is the first to reach a worldwide consensus on knowledge leaders' critical issues. These issues include knowledge leaders' roles, skills, perceived knowledge management benefits and obstacles, as well as the technologies and tools they use for implementing knowledge management initiatives. A stable level of agreement among 100 knowledge leaders has been reached on these issues. The results indicate that their most important role is to foster a knowledge sharing culture in their organization in order to overcome the most important obstacle: organizational culture. They also suggest that the key abilities a knowledge leader should possess are those of strong interpersonal and leadership skills. In addition, portals and information retrieval engines are found to be the most widely used technologies and tools to develop and/or implement knowledge management initiatives. Finally, an increase in internal knowledge sharing was judged to be the most significant of all perceived knowledge management benefits.